Also note the soon Victory Point Games will be stopping this print on demand model so soon it will become hard to find...

Oh! I knew they were publishing some things in more traditional ways, but I didn't realize they were planning to ditch the laser CNC….

Yep...they announced last year that once they moved, they would get rig of their manufacturing capabilities, becoming a standard publisher.

According to their news article...

"That is, determining which games will surely be reprinted (our best-sellers and iconic titles, of course) and which will clearly not be reprinted (and we have been slowly letting those go, announcing their departure and returning them to the loving care of their designers with our advice on helping them find a future home for their games.

Who knows where For the Crown fits in this. It is #19 on their "Best Seller" list, but who knows if that is good enough.

Now, if they actually produce a new version, having nicer components might be nice...

Going off-topic - how does that card picker choose how many Peons and Guards to replace with alternate cards?

I still need to pick up All the King's Men to get the last few alternate starting cards.

And for the rest of the cards, is it just a purely random selection, or dies it try to somehow balance it (e.g. ensure not getting only high-cost cards, or similar)?

Fair questions, all.

For the starting cards, it takes one player's portion of all the starting cards from the sets you've included (i.e. all sets, minus the ones you've excluded), shuffles them, and that determines what everyone starts with. (That sounds familiar, too, like I probably got it from the FtC rulebooks — I try to follow the rules. )

There is no forced cost-balancing, or anything like that for the others. In general, for these randomizers, I just go with what the rules say. So, if the rules technically allow an imbalanced setup, so does the randomizer. In the end, it's just a random suggestion anyway, so you can ignore it, tweak it by vetoing cards, or just request another random setup. In practice, I've played more than 300 games based on my assorted randomizers, and while the setups have been skewed once or twice — seriously, once or twice — in all those plays, none of the setups have been unplayable or unpleasant. I think that' just probability, and good card distribution and game design, working in our favor.

For the starting cards, it takes one player's portion of all the starting cards from the sets you've included (i.e. all sets, minus the ones you've excluded), shuffles them, and that determines what everyone starts with. (That sounds familiar, too, like I probably got it from the FtC rulebooks — I try to follow the rules. )

Hmm, where does the rules describe this? All I was able to found was that players might agree to exchange one or more, but no guidelines for how to do it. I've usually been running 2-3 replacements, so that the simple Guards and Peons are still the majority of the starting decks.

For the starting cards, it takes one player's portion of all the starting cards from the sets you've included (i.e. all sets, minus the ones you've excluded), shuffles them, and that determines what everyone starts with. (That sounds familiar, too, like I probably got it from the FtC rulebooks — I try to follow the rules. )

Hmm, where does the rules describe this? All I was able to found was that players might agree to exchange one or more, but no guidelines for how to do it. I've usually been running 2-3 replacements, so that the simple Guards and Peons are still the majority of the starting decks.

I was just telling you what the code does.

Looking at all the rulebooks, I see that each card can replace its respective equivalent (Peon or Guard). So, I could change the starting card randomizer to work that way, if you feel strongly about it. Technically, it says that the players agree to do it in each case. Without taking the time to analyze it, I think shuffling them and drawing has the same effect as randomly "flipping a coin" for each one. You shuffle the peons with their equivalents and draw 6, shuffle the guards with their equivalents and draw 4. Doesn't that work out the same?

Looking at all the rulebooks, I see that each card can replace its respective equivalent (Peon or Guard). So, I could change the starting card randomizer to work that way, if you feel strongly about it.

No, don't change it! I think this seems like a great way to do it - means sometimes you'll get fewer replacement cards and other times more. I was just curious if there was a rule somewhere that I had missed given that you ended your explanation with

We had a discussion about this once before, and I pointed out that your shuffle method does not give an equal chance of all possible combinations of cards. For example, consider the simple case of 4 guards and 2 alternates:

There are 4 possible results: 4 guards, 3 guards + alt 1, 3 guards + alt 2, or 2 guards + both alts. For each of those results to be equally probable, they should each occur with 25% probability.

If you shuffle all 6 cards and deal out 4, there are C(6, 4) = 15 possible deals, and only 1 of those has all 4 guards, so the "4 guards" option has probability 1/15 ~= 6.7% instead of 25%, while there are C(4, 2) = 6 ways (40%) to remove 2 guards and keep both alternates, so by symmetry there are (15 - 1 - 6) / 2 = 4 ways (26.7%) to get each of the other results.

If you flip a coin separately for each possible alternate (and then fill the remaining slots with standard cards), then you get a uniform distribution of all possible combinations...but you also run into problems if the number of alternates is larger than the number of cards you want to pick, because sometimes the coin flips will tell you to use too many cards. You can't simply stop flipping coins once you reach the maximum, because then whichever cards you flip first have a higher chance of being included, so if you want to keep your probabilities uniform, you'd have to start over from scratch whenever this happens.

There is no official method for randomizing the starting cards. You can do it however you want, including ways that aren't random at all (such as letting each player choose for half the deck). I'm just pointing out some of the repercussions of various methods.

Jeremy, I apologize for the doltish error. That's what I get for posting quickly (yes, there are 2 edits, but it's because I'd originally posted saying I'd look at the rules; seeing no responses or anything, I just edited my post… and then corrected a typographical error). Doing a search on our two names, Google kindly offered the right conversation as the top option, so I've refreshed my memory on that conversation from 3 years ago. How the heck did you even remember that discussion‽

Indeed, it seems it depends on how you want to skew your results. For example, you could coin flip for each of the 4 guard slots to replace it with something else, but there are 5 guard alternatives if you have everything. Similarly, there are 8 peon alternatives (versus 6 peon slots). So, you'd have to decide which way to bias things.

(Assuming randomization, here, because of course you can always hand-pick.)

Do you bias for the plain ol' guards by flipping 4 times, then shuffle to fill the resultant alt slots? 1/16 chance of 4 guards, 1/16 chance of 0 guards, and a bell curve in between.

Do you bias for alts by flipping once for each alt until either you've filled the slots, or run out of alts, and then fill with the standard, as necessary? Basically, we lop off the invalid side of the bell curve, and we have a 1/32 chance of 4 guards.

So, Ola, the key word you quoted from me is "try" — I try to follow the rules, but I don't always succeed.

Because you and I like how it currently is, and as Jeremy emphatically stated, there is no official method for randomizing the starting cards, and there are more alternatives than slots, I'm going to keep it this way.

Jeremy, I apologize in advance for the next rehash of this conversation in another three years.